Battery Charger / Rotten Egg Smell

[LargeMarge]

Originally Posted by R1Guy

[edited for brevity] ...what can cause a cell to short in a battery...

Excellent question.

Inside a typical lead-acid battery, lead-compound plates are suspended from the ceiling of the battery case. For this type of battery, manufacturers engineer a gap between the bottom of the plate and the floor of the case.

As the battery cycles, flakes of the lead can settle along the base of the case. Eventually, the mound of flakes builds, contacting a plate... and shorting that plate. At that point, a 12-volt battery turns into a 10-volt battery.

That sort of behavior is frowned upon.

[windcastle1]

If you have more than 1 battery in parallel and either one gets a short your charger will try and compensate the lower voltage and take the good battery down with it or in this case up in smoke. To fix this I leave each battery isolated with a battery switch and use a combiner to charge the batteries. Victron, Blue Sea and others make them but here is a link to the one we use .

https://www.victronenergy.com/battery-isolators-and-combiners/cyrix-battery-combiners

[Horus]

Discussion ok; PLEASE TAKE CARE. With this egg smell aboard the whole scene can explode! Please stop tour tests on board. Bring your batteries ashore for prof. testing.
Check not only your charger but also the diode bridge (so far mounted).
Stop your experiments on board with these batteries on board.

[chowdan]

Be very cognizant of your battery. Shortly after buying my boat(on the hard), I left for a week and returned(water levels were fine before I left) and returned to a rotten egg smell. I found the source being this. I was very fortunate enough to not have an explosion or fire.